Stock photos
BBC News' obsession with filling their articles with stock photos that contain no relevant information is reaching absurd extremes.
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BBC News' obsession with filling their articles with stock photos that contain no relevant information is reaching absurd extremes.
ebay
Buying things on eBay became more fun once I started getting creative with the feedback that I leave for people.
12 inch pianist
For anyone who doesn't get today's xkcd (I did, but there seem to be quite a few people who haven't heard that joke before).The Buddha Lounge
The Indian restaurant opposite my house, which was called The Natraj, has reinvented itself as a trendy bar, called "The Buddha Lounge". This is ironic on multiple levels.
Firstly, the Five precepts of Buddhism forbid the consumption of alcohol or intoxicating substances. Secondly, the more strict Eight precepts encourage followers to abstain from music and dancing, and also from all sexual activity (and the main purpose of these types of bar is basically to find willing sexual partners). Finally, followers also refrain from "luxurious places for sitting or sleeping", so even the "lounge" part is out.
What's next, the Jesus Casino?
Does this make me an Internet star?
I was reading the Wikipedia article about Ken Silverman's PNGOUT, which is a program for creating optimised versions of PNG images. However, it was the screenshot in that article that intrigued me the most. Upon further investigation, it seems that a group of Wikipedia users have been running a minor contest amongst themselves to create the most optimised version possible of an image I originally uploaded three years ago.
It's really weird when you stumble across things like this.
c-algorithms 1.2.0
Version 1.2.0 of my C Algorithms library is up. The biggest changes in this release are the improvements to the test suite. I've written a bit about the test process that I've been using for improving the library.
Learning about coverage tools has been an interesting process. I liken writing tests without using coverage analysis to trying to optimise code without doing any profiling. With optimisation, it's easy to pick something that you think is a bottleneck and waste lots of time optimising it; in the same way, I've found that it's possible to write tests that you think are exercising the code in a satisfactory way, but actually aren't. Profiling helps to show exactly what's going on. In the course of analysing the library, I found a bug that should have been shown up in the tests, but wasn't, because the tests weren't exercising all of the code as I assumed they were.
Testing how code behaves in failure conditions is as important as testing how it behaves normally, so I wrote some code that uses #define macros to wrap the standard C allocation functions and allow the tests to simulate memory allocation failures. Again, coverage analysis is helpful here, too.
All in all, I'm not entirely sure why I'm writing a data structures and algorithms library, considering that all of these things have already been implemented hundreds of times over by different people. I originally wrote the library to remove the dependency of Irmo on GLib. Since then it's taken on a life and direction of its own, probably due to my own slightly obsessive nature. I think I just like the process of crafting something to the highest quality I possibly can.
(Also: Open source software with a test process? World coming to an end!)
4 gigs of pain
We're rapidly reaching (or have reached?) the point where it's standard to have at least 4 gigabytes of RAM in desktop PCs. This presents an interesting dilemma, because most people run 32 bit operating systems; 32 bits doesn't allow more than 4GB of RAM to be addressed. The ideal alternative is to move to 64 bits; all modern CPUs support x86-64. Unfortunately, it requires a massive porting effort to get everything working on x86-64 (drivers from third party vendors are likely to be the biggest problem), so we're not quite there yet.
In the meantime, there's a useful feature called PAE which allows up to 64GB to be addressed by a 32 bit OS. I was surprised to see, however, that neither Windows XP or even Vista support it, although the server-based versions of Windows do!
The cynic in me wondered if this was a deliberate attempt by Microsoft to stop people from using the normal desktop version of Windows for running big servers, but this seemed a bit too much, even for them. But the Wikipedia article has the actual reason: "desktop versions of Windows (Windows XP, Windows Vista) limit physical address space to 4 GB for driver compatibility reasons".
So poor Microsoft appear to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. They cannot enable PAE, which is, in a sense, a backwards compatibility feature, because doing so would break driver backwards compatibility. This would appear to be an example of a situation where the Linux-style hatred of stable APIs wins over maintaining backwards compatibility. One part of the problem is that Microsoft relies on third-party vendors for drivers. They can't just update their platform and the drivers with it, because they don't have any control over them.
Gnome 3.0
The Gnome 3.0 announcement is a win for sanity and demonstrates the maturity of the people running the project. There's an elegance about a project that aims to be boring-but-functional, rather than exciting-and-unstable. Rather ironic for a project that was once described as a "cascade of attention-deficit teenagers".
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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